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India: The state govt of Indian state, Maharashtra, is using GPS and satellite mapping technology to monitor the forest cover in the state. “The government will use GPS and satellite mapping technology to monitor the forest cover. We are keen to introduce such technologies with the help of companies and NGOs in the three next months,” state Forest Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar said on July 3.

On the ‘tree plantation’ drive organised by the state government on July 1 across Maharashtra, he said, “Planting two crore trees in a single day was not the target. But it was an earnest attempt to make the drive a people’s movement and I am overwhelmed by their response.” “In fact, people’s participation has proved to be a great motivation for the government as over 2.82 crore saplings were planted on that day, which was well above our expectations,” the minister said.

“In my experience, no government project is successful without active participation of common people,” Mungantiwar said, adding, “The ultimate aim of the tree plantation drive is to make Maharashtra green and a better place for future generations.” According to the minister, the state government is working to launch 27 schemes which include, Tree Bank, Eco Battalion from Armed forces, Green Battalion through NGOs.

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In an exclusive interview with GeoBuiz Derek Clarke says that Access to geospatial communication is a key to get user information.

Public Agency of the Year 2015 is a great honor for us. We have a portal through which we provide mapping services and geospatial information. Access to geospatial communication is a key point to get user information. We have regular programmes for refreshing imagery in South Africa. We have strong policy on lands reforms. We are trying to provide security tenure to all people in South Africa.

Every land has value. We need to look at formal valuation system as well as traditional value. Geospatial information is the key to any development project. Geospatial information helps in better decision making, planning and monitoring.

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Greg Scott, Inter-Regional Advisor, UN-GGIM Secretariat explains about importance of Geospatial data is for meeting the SDGs.

The Geospatial Ambassador of the year 2015 is a reflection of my efforts.Geospatial data is very important for meeting the SDGs. Earth Observations statistics and other new data support the sustainable development process. We need to integrate information systems at a national level that flow up into a regional and global level. The framework is a national bottom-up approach. In developing countries the use of data construct framework depends on institutional and architectural arrangements. We are moving to rich data paradigm. Turning data into valuable information to support decision making requires change.

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ESA and China have Launched the fourth phase of the collaborative Dragon programme in Wuhan City, on the Yangtze River, which recently experienced major floods witnessed by Europe’s Sentinel-1 Satellite.

ESA and representatives of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) met in Wuhan to sign the cooperation agreement, which begins the fourth phase of the collaborative Dragon programme.

As a joint undertaking between ESA and the National Remote Sensing Centre of China (NRSCC), under MOST, the programme promotes the use of ESA, Third Party MISSion, Copernicus Sentinels and Chinese Earth observation satellite data within Europe and China, for science and applications.

The annual Dragon symposium held this week at the University of Wuhan saw over 350 participants concluding the third phase of this programme, and launching the fourth period.

After 12 years of cooperation, MOST Vice Minister Yin Hejun stated that, “Through the implementation of Dragon, China and Europe have explored a new international scientific and technological cooperation mechanism, which has achieved impressive results.”

ESA’s Director General, Jan Woerner, confirmed, “The Dragon programme is an example of international cooperation bringing out the best science from European and Chinese researchers, using both European and Chinese Earth observation data sources.”

In the new phase, European and Chinese teams will work together over the next four years to produce new science and results. Several of the new missions’ data will allow improved temporal, spatial and spectral coverage over the selected Dragon-4 test sites.

This will be achieved with more satellites being launched in the coming years, such as the Chinese FY, GF and TanSat missions, as well as European Sentinel and Earth Explorer satellites. Some 650 scientists from 234 European and Chinese research institutes will be involved in Dragon-4.

As a recent example of the collaboration between Europe and China, scientists have identified an overall drop in water level in the Poyang Lake over the last decade, but the recent El Niño weather phenomenon has caused precipitation levels to increase and the lake’s water levels to rise.

The Poyang Lake in Jiangxi province is the largest freshwater lake in the country. It is an important habitat for migrating wildfowl such as the rare Siberian cranes, many of which spend the winter there. The basin is also one of China’s most important rice-producing regions, although local inhabitants must contend with massive seasonal changes in water level.

In the above animation, radar images from Europe’s Sentinel-1 satellite mission show the evolution of the lake from July 2015 through May of this year.

Dr. Hervé Yesou, Dragon-4 lead investigator, commented, “Seasonal fluctuations are evident, with low water extent in winter, which then changes gradually with the rainy season as individual lakes reconnect to become a large water body.”

Thanks to systematic acquisition of Sentinel-1 data, a new radar image was acquired on 5 July, showing the water presence in the landscape, from Poyang Lake’s shores to the Yangtze River’s banks. Comparison of July 2015 and July 2016 images clearly shows that this year water is overflowing everywhere, including the Wuhan City area

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Geoscience Australia’s Innovation Showcase will highlight recent and ongoing geoscience innovations with the potential to influence the Australian Government’s ability to use geoscience for more effective decision making:

  • The Australian Geoscience Data Cube: From satellites to insights and better decisions. The transformation of 40 years of Landsat satellite images into a comprehensive continental analysis system that can tell us how our land and water has changed and provides tools to monitor change into the future (Trevor Dhu)
  • Moving Australia into the future with a modern spatial reference system. The promise of high-precision GPS to enable automated vehicles and more is dependent on having a high-precision datum – how do you do that when the Earth’s crust itself is moving? (Dan Jaksa)
  • Mineral Potential Mapper – using mineral systems science and data integration to predict the next big one. Mining is a key component of the Australian economy, but discovering and developing and ore body takes decades. How can we use our geoscience data to accelerate discovery and encourage investment? (Richard Blewett, Karol Czarnota)

The talks will be followed by a 30 minute Q&A panel session. This public seminar is presented as part of the Geoscience Australia Wednesday Seminar series.

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China will put 14 more meteorological satellites into orbit over the next decade, according to a conference on Monday.

By 2025, China plans to launch one Fengyun-II satellite, four Fengyun-IIIs, three Fengyun-IVs and another 6 for multiple meteorological purposes, Wu Yanhua, deputy head of the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, said at a seminar on Fengyun satellite development.

Fengyun satellites are a series of remote-sensing meteorological satellites developed by China. The Fengyun series is an important part of the earth observation satellite system.

China has launched 14 Fengyun satellites since 1988, with seven still in orbit as part of the World Meteorological Organization network.

Source: Xinhua News Agency

A new web map allows for an interactive view of the impact of electricity in India. The spread of electricity in India has been an ongoing objective for more than 20 years, however, there are still more than 310 million people in mostly rural areas that still don’t have electricity in their homes.

The Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikara Youani (RGGVY) national program to spread electricity in the country launched in 2005. The RGGVY program has four main focuses: construction of a rural electricity distribution backbone, electrification of villages that have more than 100 people, creating distributed generation networks in areas where connecting to the grid is cost prohibitive, and providing free power connections to households below the poverty line.

Using satellite imagery of light output from villages at night, University of Michigan researchers explored light output of 600,000 villages. The light at night make up 4.4 billion data points that help RGGVY and other stakeholders with verification of the spread of electricity over a 20-year timeframe.

Explore the online map here

The government of India will undergo a detailed mapping effort of all the mineral resources in the country. The country is known as a mineral-rich area with 28 varieties of minerals that include precious stones. The minerals that will be mapped include diamonds, iron ore, coal, limestone, dolomite, tin ore, bauxite and gold.

The national government unveiled the National Mineral Exploration Policy on Monday, calling for comprehensive exploration of non-fuel and non-coal mineral resources. The objective is to boost the national economy through mineral exploration.

Satellite imagery, and other space-based sensing, will contribute for both mineral exploration as well as checking for illegal mining.

Private agencies will carry out exploration with the right to a certain share of revenue from mineral auctions. The revenue share is seen as a means to reduce costs.

The legislation also calls for a National Geoscience Data Repository that will form the baseline for mineral exploration and will be open as a public good.

The policy can be reviewed online here

By Mark Reichardt – May 21, 2016. As geospatial data becomes more common and useful to all aspects of commerce and personal activities, users are demanding simple ways to access content, thus turning the focus on interoperability and consistency in service of data. – By Mark Reichardt, Scott Simmons & Simon Chester, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

Much like information technology (IT) before it, GIS and spatial technology has grown from a niche technology used by experts to become a tool critical to many business processes. Further to this, “location” is now a foundational element for many consumer and citizen services, with location-based services — through sensors and mobile devices — being used daily by millions across the globe.

But how did it get to this point?

In the early days of GIS, ‘silos of excellence’ were created around domains and tailored to suit the specific needs of large organizations. With a lack of universally open standards, these were designed using proprietary formats. There was also a culture of protecting and hoarding data, but little understanding of the benefits of sharing. However, there were glimmers of an ‘open’ movement brewing, akin to those that drove the success of the Internet and World Wide Web, where the geospatial community realized that interconnectivity and interoperability would increase utility and drive innovation.

During this time, if there was a need for data to be shared between multiple GIS systems, the only solution was to write custom code — a costly and time-consuming exercise. One pioneering solution was to have the government community align on a single implementation of GIS. GRASS — a Unix-based GIS created by the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) — was an initial choice; free, modular, and maintained in a process driven by user input. GRASS was eventually released to academic community and then moved into Web-based open source maintenance in 1997.

But as the geospatial industry expanded with more choices of GIS tools and as geospatial content became more broadly available to serve public and private sector interests, the issue of data sharing became a more important industry-wide issue. Actual “technical interoperability” — a commonly understood communication of data and instructions between two different systems — was an idea only a few had explored in the community, but was a challenge in need of a solution.

In 1994, the Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (now the Open Geospatial Consortium) was founded as an international voluntary consensus standards organization. The goal was to bring together the rapidly expanding community of GIS developers and users to achieve true “interoperability” between geospatial information sources and associated software tools. The OGC vision was one of diverse geoprocessing systems communicating directly over networks by means of a set of open interfaces based on the “Open Geodata Interoperability Specification” (OGIS).

This vision led, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, to the birth and maturation of a framework of OGC Open Web Services standards that allowed geographically separate servers and processes to interconnect with each other.

Disparate silos to a standards-based industry

A global take up of these standards further progressed GIS’ utility, and transformed the industry from disparate silos to a standards-based, interoperable collection of geospatial information sources, process and end user tools.

Governments rapidly began realizing the benefit of opening data and sharing it across government agencies and industry, and this period saw the inclusion of open, interoperable standards as a foundational component of National Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs), as well as a growing body of policy and law favoring, and even mandating, open standards for geospatial implementations in government. Examples of countries advancing SDIs underpinned by standards include Canada, New Zealand, India, US, with regional SDIs exemplified by INSPIRE in Europe.

The sharing of authoritative, government data resulted in a broad global advancement of OGC-based geospatial product offerings from industry. Software vendors developed products that served content through OGC standards to augment their proprietary service architectures and data providers began populating large databases to be served through commercial and open source OGC-compliant implementations.

Benefit to the society

This is one area where the adoption of open, interoperable standards not only helped propel the geospatial industry forward, but also had a notable impact on society, as these spatial data services have enabled rapid support to responders during natural disasters, maritime issues, and other critical tasks — bringing tangible benefit to the global community, and even helping save lives.

With a consistent baseline of enabling standards established, government agencies, especially those representing the defense, public safety, and emergency management and response communities, became focused on the need to establish shared situational awareness with their partners via ‘common operating pictures.’ A number of these communities began to take leadership roles in standards development organizations (SDOs), including the OGC, to achieve the standards-based interoperability necessary to make this goal a reality. These SDOs, in turn, formed liaison agreements to align their efforts and provide consistent standards across their respective user communities. For instance, many OGC standards move into the ISO process to become ISO Standards and the two bodies work wherever possible to align their efforts in geospatial standards creation.

With the expansion of the Internet in the mid 2000s, browser-based maps — as well as free Web-connected desktop software like NASA World Wind and Google Earth — increased in both utility and popularity. Having such broad availability of maps and map services on the Web — thanks again in part to open and interoperable standards — allowed a single mapping application to draw on data from many different sources. This meant that non-experts, including the general public, were for the first time contributing to the creation and maintenance of spatial data, whether it be through participation in the crowd sourcing efforts such as the OpenStreetMap project, or by sending feedback reports while using Google Maps.

The pace and impact of OGC and related ISO geospatial standards deepened within the last decade.

⇒ Systems Integrators increased their commitment to open standards including OGC geospatial standards on behalf of their clients, moving away from closed technology solutions towards standards-based interoperability. This work enables their clients to more flexibly extend their service solutions by virtue of open standards architecture.
⇒ IT solution providers broadened their adoption of OGC and ISO standards in response to the growing user community preference for open standards and to position spatially enabled products and services for application across new markets.
⇒ Geodata content discovery and access from government and commercial providers improved as open standards facilitated exchange and sharing. DigitalGlobe, exactEarth, and other commercial satellite providers leverage OGC standards for distribution to the community. The Group on Earth Observations advances a Global Earth System of Systems (GEOSS) Common Infrastructure emphasizing OGC, ISO and complimentary open standards to enable interoperability across the myriad of national EO assets.
⇒ As the geospatial industry undergoes consolidation, OGC standards have become an important enabler to assist companies in achieving interoperability across previously separate vendor product lines, and in integrating acquired products.

Advancing standards

Today, “location” has become an underpinning to countless business functions, products and services; and the focus of startups and where geospatial information and technologies have become a crucial enabler of broader IT business decisions. Through the mid 2000’s, OGC was focussed largely on advancing standards to establish fundamental interoperability across applications, systems and networks. Today, however, a significant amount of OGC work is committed to assisting user communities in developing standards best practices to enable interoperability across their community of interest, and with other communities of interest.

With the spatial industry’s growing capability and reach across public and private sector communities, OGC is placing emphasis on advancing standards to address the changing technology marketplace, as well as assisting in the identification and adoption of common standards frameworks that assure greater levels of interoperability.

Yet challenges remain

Interoperability and consistency in service of data has been tailored to powerful computing resources. Users now consume and create geodata on handheld devices, limited in computational power and bandwidth. The OGC is working with its members and many alliance partner SDOs and community associations to develop more lightweight standards to facilitate data sharing across diversely-capable devices: the OGC GeoPackage standard is an example of a flexible, low-overhead mechanism to store and exchange geospatial content.

It is also important to consider that as geospatial data becomes more common and useful to all aspects of commerce and personal activities, users will demand increasingly simple ways to access content. Expect lightweight APIs, such as the OGC SensorThings API for the Internet of Things, to advance. SDOs will need to redefine some of their processes to accommodate a rapidly-changing technology workplace where innovation occurs in months, not years.

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by Mike Gruss — May 18, 2016. ORLANDO, Florida – The director of the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates the country’s spy satellites, said May 18 that the intelligence agency, known for its gigantic satellites, intends to increase its use of cubesats in the near future.

Betty Sapp, the head of the NRO, rarely grants interviews and her annual speech at the GEOINT conference is one of the few, if only, unclassified opportunities to better understand how the agency is operating.

While the NRO is often associated with some of the space industry’s heaviest and largest satellites, Sapp said the NRO is also launching cubesats, and not just as experiments or technical demonstrations.

“Now, we’re using them for actual mission application,” she said.

The NRO has sponsored more than 15 cubesats on various launches over the last five years.

“Cubesats, smaller sats, combined with affordable launch, are a huge enabler for us,” she said. “It’s exciting.”

The new technology allows the NRO to “chase” missions that otherwise would have been too expensive, she said. Because NRO budgets and missions are classified, Sapp declined to offer additional details on the cubesat missions.

Sapp also said the NRO’s next-generation ground control architecture, a common ground system that would allow the intelligence community to operate the nation’s spy satellites from one platform, would move away from ground systems built for individual programs.

The new system would take “full advantage” of the private sector by improving processing speeds and data encryption. As such, it could automatically redirect NRO satellites to gather additional data as well as “notice the unusual hidden among the host of the usual (and) anticipate the next move, not just respond to the one just made,” Sapp said.

Those comments were the most specific remarks Sapp has made on the next-generation program known as the Future Ground Architecture.

Sapp first mentioned the idea for the architecture in an interview with Signal Magazine last year. Among the ideas is that the system would work with the space architecture as a whole and predict where to aim space assets, some of which were tested in its Sentient Enterprise Program in recent years.

In addition, Frank Cavelli, the NRO’s principal deputy director, mentioned the new ground system in written testimony before the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee March 15.

“Our Future Ground Architecture will transform our ground architecture into an integrated enterprise which empowers users of all types with the capabilities to receive, process, and generate tailored, timely, highly-assured, and actionable intelligence,” Cavelli said.

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